Last night's TV

Lem is dead. Shane is racked with guilt. Kavanaugh is obsessed. Vic is consumed with rage and lust for vengeance. The Shield is back.

The Strike Team was fooled by Aceveda and Kavanaugh into thinking that Lemansky had sold them out, you see. To save them all, Shane killed his friend by tipping a live grenade into his car with a tortured look and a whispered apology.

If you don't know who all these people are and what Lem was going to spill (or not, as it turned out), then I'm afraid I have not enough time to explain it to you in full. It involved hijacking an Armenian money train, innumerable smaller corruptions, a cop-killing by Vic in the very first episode, and the whole thing has become knotted beyond the unpicking by mere mortals.

Except Kavanaugh. He is a man now wholly and irrevocably dedicated to bringing Vic down, and if he has to fabricate evidence he knows should be there in order to do so, he will. Forest Whitaker grabbed the role of Kavanaugh, a man driven beyond reason by his quest, at the beginning of last season, and has been shaking it like a dog with a particularly robust and juicy rabbit ever since.

Everyone believes that the El Salvadoran gang killed Lem, but Kavanaugh's seething stew of instinct and loathing foments round the belief that Vic did it. Which, of course, puts him closer to the truth than the rest of the investigators but still, crucially, not right on it. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh - a man who, before his immersion in the Strike Team's unholy waters, cleaved to the very letter of the law - coerces an informant into saying she helped Vic arrange a hit on him, and then plants evidence at Vic's apartment.

Meanwhile, Shane nearly immolates himself rescuing hostages from a junkie, the top brass try to force Vic into early retirement before - I paraphrase, but not much - the shit hits the fan, and Dutch and Claudette stumble across a mass murder. And I do mean mass.

It's chaotic, it's almost impossible to follow, it's full of blood, gore, heart and tortured souls. The Shield is back, and it might just be better than ever.